"A French academic who published Anne Frank’s diary online on 1 January despite the strenuous objections of the Anne Frank Fonds has said that the page on which he launched the text has now been viewed more than 50,000 times.

On 1 January, University of Nantes lecturer Olivier Ertzscheid and French MP Isabelle Attard separately published online the Dutch text of Frank’s account of her family’s time in hiding during the second world war. They argue that because 70 years have elapsed since Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and because across much of Europe copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death, the work has now entered the public domain.

But the Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation established by Anne’s father Otto Frank, has vigorously denied this. It claims that while Anne was the sole author of the original diaries, “Otto Frank and children’s author and translator, Mirjam Pressler, were inter alia responsible for the various edited versions of fragments of the diary”, published in 1947 and 1991, respectively, and “the copyrights to these adaptations have been vested in Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler, who in effect created readable books from Anne Frank’s original writings”. Otto Frank died in 1980, while Pressler is still alive. So the foundation, which gives all its income to charitable causes, argues that the diary is still protected by European copyright laws."